MICHELLE WINGARD
Michelle Westmark Wingard is an installation-based photographer, curator, and arts educator. She is Professor of Art and Gallery Director of Bethel University’s two exhibition spaces. In her seventeen years of programming exhibitions, Wingard has worked with 100+ artists in a diverse range of media. In the 2019-20 and 2020-21 program cycles, Wingard was honored to serve as a Curatorial Mentor for the Emerging Curators Institute (ECI). Her photographic and curatorial projects often seek to create experiential and participatory opportunities exploring themes of memory, grief, memorial, perception, and interconnection. Wingard thinks about all aspects of her work as gestures of care. She has curated several exhibitions and has also exhibited her own photographic work locally and nationally. She is the recipient of the Jerome Travel Grant (2015) and the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant (2017 and 2019). Wingard holds an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (2006). She lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Artist Statement
The Frost Feathers series explores perceptions of control and tumult through the sometimes, unpredictable cyanotype process. Cyanotype is a photographic process similar to pre-computer architectural "blueprints". UV light fundamentally changes the compositional state of the cyanotype emulsion—transforming it permanently to its Prussian blue color. Similar to the way cyanotype emulsion is dramatically altered by its exposure to light, we too have been adapting to change - be it cultural, climate, social – over the last several years. I’ve been making cyanotypes using the unpredictable frost on my windows as negatives - dependent on sub-zero temps and the elusive sunny winter day. There is a daily tipping point when the frost begins to melt just as there is enough sunlight to make the exposure. The meticulously repetitive lines drawn on the surface of the print ponder postures of acceptance and resistance. We have been navigating historically significant times of amassed real and ambiguous losses. The meticulously repetitive lines explore perceptions of order and uses implied layered horizon lines as a metaphor for the intangible, layered histories, and varying perspectives as a way of responding to the anxiety of now.
